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keeganpoppen

837 karma · joined February 15, 2010

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keeganpoppen··on Learnings from 100K lines of Rust with AI (2025)
as someone who is about as llm-forward as anyone out there, this is a brilliant analogy. was equally true of all the “prompt engineer” hype as well from a couple years ago (which i admit i still think does matter)… it kinda makes me feel like an audiophile / hi-fi person talking about how 24bit/192kHz is the one true encoding format and anything less is a willfull (cynical, “Quality”-hating, satisficerist, etc.) compromise. which i freely admit to being one of those people as well.

and in both cases i both “know” that i can tell the difference and “know that i cannot tell the difference”. what anyone takes from that in terms of what it says about me, personally, is a bit of a Rorschack test, but Astrology is about as apt a description as there is… xD

keeganpoppen··on Node.js 26.0.0 (Now with Temporal)
i'm pretty sure all that stuff works w/ Temporal... Temporal is extremely well-designed, in my experience. the js date object, on the other hand, has insane pitfalls, and i say this as someone who thinks not understanding JS ASI is a "skill issue", among other happily-un-"ergonomic" worldviews...
keeganpoppen··on The Aperiodic Table
> Does aperiodicity have any cool properties that help in specific domains?

well, it helps as the basis for all life on the planet as we know it (DNA, RNA, et al.). which is pithy, but i think actually has fairly deep implications (ie is not _just_ pithy).

keeganpoppen··on Show HN: Claude Code vs. Codex Global Usage Leaderboard
the human touch from human curation of the ai output, which tends to be sorely lacking.
keeganpoppen··on ABC News has taken all FiveThirtyEight articles offline
this is what the salesforces of the world do to startups every day. it is so painful to watch. billions upon billions wasted for just the stupidest possible reasons.
keeganpoppen··on Steve Jobs in Exile – New book on his years at NeXT Computer
cannot wait for this book. it is insane that steve jobs has somehow become underrated because the lesson has become “sometimes assholes are geniuses”… that is such a painfully reductive narrative it beggars belief. there is a reason he is in/on the pantheon, and to talk yourself out of it is to do yourself a disservice. it’s just that a lot of his skills are not transferable because you have to cultivate the kind of taste he spent his whole life acquiring. the only transferable skill is in finding the next one (me, obviously, xP), so that we can similarly talk ourselves into how it was obvious and evolutionary and etc.

i cannot summon any other product announcements that ANYONE cared about in the way that people in my (nerd) dorm did for steve. you don’t have to put his merits and demerits on a ledger to appreciate his greatness. just take “the good parts” and leave the bad. he is sui generis.

keeganpoppen··on Ask HN: We just had an actual UUID v4 collision...
as would be a million things that don’t involve using uuids at all. it literally means nothing to say “this can be handled by centralizing your uuid store”… if you do that, you DON’T NEED UUIDS. THAT IS THE POINT!
keeganpoppen··on Rewrite Bun in Rust has been merged
i find it hilarious how desperate people are to cope that this can’t possibly work, must be horrible, etc. for all i know, it is. but let’s just see how well it works, rather than “no true scotsman” grouse about it. it is so sad. it reeks of “doth protest too much” energy. if it were so obvious that ai was insufficient to do the work, then i don’t think you’d have to circle the wagons about it. you could just confidently watch the market turn on the product and know the reason why. and all that would prove is just how special you all are that ai cannot replicate your genius. the reality is that foundation model makers have been dogfooding their own vibes for multiple years now, and it is clearly is good enough for _them_. but yeah, i’m sure that’s just a total fluke and they are all idiots. /eyeroll
keeganpoppen··on Bun's Rust rewrite has been merged
i find it hilarious how desperate people are to cope that this can’t possibly work, must be horrible, etc. for all i know, it is. but let’s just see how well it works, rather than “no true scotsman” grouse about it. it is so sad.

it reeks of “doth protest too much” energy. if it were so obvious that ai was insufficient to do the work, then i don’t think you’d have to circle the wagons about it. you could just confidently watch the market turn on the product and know the reason why. and all that would prove is just how special you all are that ai cannot replicate your genius.

the reality is that foundation model makers have been dogfooding their own vibes for multiple years now, and it is clearly is good enough for _them_. but yeah, i’m sure that’s just a total fluke and they are all idiots. /eyeroll

keeganpoppen··on The European Union backs Italy's right to make Meta pay for news
nah facebook definitely was not hated on since the beginning… if you mean “meta” specifically, then yes, i actually agree. kinda like a “prince turning his name into a symbol” jump-discontinuous moment that marked the changing of the tides.
keeganpoppen··on The European Union backs Italy's right to make Meta pay for news
yeah somehow it is a minority opinion to shout “this is obviously stupid” from the rooftops… i guess meta has gone from startup to … utility(?) over the course of the last decade, but i have yet to see anything in this equivalence class of decision that isn’t just obviously idiotic… gl to italy, i guess. wish them all the best.
keeganpoppen··on Chess puzzle I found in my dad's old book
wow. oddly that seems like an easier problem, despite the solution space being smaller. not saying i woulda solved that, because i doubt it, but it’s much closer to what my raw intuition woulda spit out as a solutuon to the OG problem.
keeganpoppen··on Chess puzzle I found in my dad's old book
yeah i had that same intuition and then realized that you _have_ to have pieces that overlap responsibility to fully “cover”. amazing puzzle. i can’t claim i solved it, because i didn’t, but i did give it 15 minutes of focused time, which is pretty good.
keeganpoppen··on Sam Altman's Business Dealings Under GOP Scrutiny Ahead of OpenAI's IPO
could not agree with this take more. it feels like a bait and switch, but not the kind that makes me want to take sharpie to cardboard. it’s just… weird. and i don’t even necessarily think it’s “bad”… it’s just a weird unforced error because openai never “had” to be nonprofit, but they chose that path only to abandon it. just strange. and it makes all their internal docs (especially brockman’s diary, which, as an aside: how the fuck did this shit come up in discovery, and what kind of idiot would say the shit he said in a diary that can come up in discovery like this? i know he is a very smart man, which is what makes it extra hilarious.). but yeah even with how “bad” the various quotes look i’m still mostly on the side of this all being a “nothing-burger”…
keeganpoppen··on Chess puzzle I found in my dad's old book
damn that is hard
keeganpoppen··on A message from President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline
this might be true, but certainly isn't/shouldn't be true for MIT graduates. if you own a business of any kind, hiring an MIT grad is basically never a bad decision.
keeganpoppen··on Ask HN: We just had an actual UUID v4 collision...
exactly lmao. that is exactly what is being presented as "scalable <full stop>". sigh.
keeganpoppen··on Ask HN: We just had an actual UUID v4 collision...
literally the whole point of randomly generating UUIDs is that you don't need to check for collision. that's what the "U"s are for. that is the abstraction that is supposedly being provided. "using <insert Amazon AWS Certification Test Answer #7>" is not in any way a "scalable solution" for that with no other context. nor is just throwing out <random Martin Fowler concept #27>. the whole point is that it is a global (well, per name, "universal") abstraction that can, in practice, have holes that make it so you can't use it "universal"-ly.
keeganpoppen··on AWS North Virginia data center outage – recovery to take hours
anecdotally (well, more "second-hand-ly i heard that..." it sounds like there were some carry-on effects on us-east-2 as a result of people migrating over from us-east-1, so, yeah... kinda hilarious how the multiple region / AZ thing is just so plainly a façade, but yet we all seem to just collectively believe in it as an article of faith in the Cloud Religion... or whatever...
keeganpoppen··on Cartoon Network Flash Games
some of these were actually pretty fun... i can't remember any of the names, but there were a few that were like pretty big adventure games that took like a couple hours to get through that i remember enjoying as a kid. and the best part? you could download the game and then run it offline so that you don't hog the family home phone line! :)
keeganpoppen··on Boris Cherny: TI-83 Plus Basic Programming Tutorial (2004)
this is what got me into programming, before i even knew i was a programmer
keeganpoppen··on Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like
it’s sad that i had to triple-read this to determine you weren’t being sarcastic. sad for whom? i don’t know. but the amplifier take is exactly the right one.
keeganpoppen··on Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing
when the iphone originally came out, this was absolutely true. the way it handled rendering the desktop versions of pages alone, w/ the double-tap-to-zoom put it in its own tier beyond the blackberries / n-gages / etc. contemporaneously extant. beyond that, it was clearly just a better ux on existing tech, i’ll give you that.
keeganpoppen··on Codex for almost everything
everyone seems to unconditionally love anthropic, but openai has always had the best models… it just requires a bit more effort on behalf of the user to actually leverage it.
keeganpoppen··on Claude Opus 4.7
codex low-key seems to be better than claude. and i say this as an 18-hour-a-day user of both (mostly claude)
keeganpoppen··on Does Gas Town 'steal' usage from users' LLM credits to improve itself?
iono if “steal” has the right valence here
keeganpoppen··on The future of everything is lies, I guess: Work
i respect the author of this post wayyyy too much to ever imply that i know more than them, or that i even have proprietary knowledge that they, themselves do not possess. i admire aphyr, and i aesthetically agree with many of the arguments offered forth. but this whole thing feels a bit cherry-picked— i’m not gonna go chapter-and-verse (cf. belt-and-suspenders) about it, but on some levels this comes across as a bit superficial. i think the general thrust— that ai is a sort of Narcissus’s pond— is completely a reasonable and well-considered take. but i would be shocked if someone with the intellectual powers of someone like Aphyr has never had an interaction with an ai in which they did not feel like they were interacting with the deep recesses of their mind in a way both profound and, more importantly, productive. and yeah, there’s plenty of pyrite in them thar hills. but, it does have this almost Lord of the Rings The One Ring -esque pull when you get into a certain “embedding space” (/ thought space) in a certain thread conversing with ai. it genuinely is a profound transformation of cognition, and working superlinearly productively with it is a matter of “when”, not “if”. i share all the same aeathetic concerns, and all the deeper ones. but there have been sessions that i have had with ai that made me blankly stare up at the heavens as well, and i don’t think i’m anywhere near the only one.
keeganpoppen··on 1D Chess
just work backward from the moves it allows you to make— it tells you when it’s hopeless, so thus if it lets you move, you’re onto something. took me like 9 or 10 tries easily.
keeganpoppen··on 1D Chess
that took me way longer than i thought it would, but made me all the happier for it
keeganpoppen··on A truck driver spent 20 years making a scale model of every building in NYC
i absolutely love the sentiment from this closing sentence:

> “One of the reasons Joe is so insistent that every single building is here is because he would never want someone to come and see it and not be able to find where they live and see their story,” Sherman tells Artnet.

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